How Wyoming Can Steal Colorado’s Sales Taxes

Colorado is losing a lot of money to Wyoming after it raised its tobacco taxes. Those who enjoy tobacco products, in all its forms, are flooding across the boarder to take advantage of lower prices. Sales at some Wyoming stores are up as much as 75%. You can read more about that here.

The state of Wyoming has made serious cuts to its budget due to declining revenues. There has been talk of raising sales taxes, but so far that has not been done.

But when looking for new sources of revenue raising prices is usually not the way to go.

If you owned a retail store you would want to keep your prices lower than your competitors, if you wanted to make more money. No one temporarily raises prices to make more, but having a sale works.

So, rather than raising sales taxes, Wyoming needs to keep them low, and advertise it.

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Many Wyomingites travel down to Colorado on shopping sprees. There are a lot of wonderful outlets down there. But the prices are high, and they get even higher when Colorado's sales taxes are added in. The state tax is 2.9% but add in county and city taxes and it can soar to over 11%.

In a ranking map, seen here, of which states have the highest and lowest sales taxes, 50 being the highest taxes, Wyoming ranks #6. 

Wyoming has the lowest taxes of any state around it, minus Montana.

So why doesn't Wyoming have all of those outlet malls that Colorado does? We can save people in surrounding states a lot of money if they come and shop with us.

To our Governor and state legislators, if you want to bring in more sales tax revenue, keep Wyoming sales tax low and advertise it. Encourage retail outlet chains to build along our boarders.

We can bring extra tax money in, not because we raised our taxes, but because our neighbors raised theirs.